Lesson 3: Congress Expected Outcomes To understand the structure and process of the legislative branch, and to be familiar with both sides of the...

Congress now has some difficult times ahead - and some difficult decisions to make for the American people. After reading Lesson 3, answer the following questions:

Given what you now know about how Congress works and how a bill is passed, what is different about an omnibus bill? What is the strategy behind omnibus bills? Provide an example from American politics. Other countries, especially Canada, use omnibus bills, but since this is an American government class, please stick with legislation from this country, at the federal or state level.

(Please stay out of the politics and use the PROCESS of implementation as the foundation of your answer, such as reconciliation.)

Assignment responses should be no more than about 500 words. Chicago style format.

Lesson 3: CongressExpected OutcomesTo understand the structure and process of the legislative branch, and to be familiar with both sides of the debate surrounding electronic voting and other controversies.OverviewThe US Constitution provides for "separation of powers" and "checks and balances," but it is still fair to claim that the Founding Fathers anticipated that Congress would be the most central branch of government – the branch that gave clearest voice to the diverse opinions and aspirations of voters. That's partly why its duties and responsibilities are included in Article I of the Constitution. The principal architect of the US Constitution, James Madison, made this clear in The Federalist Papers #51:"But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates."James Madison also feared excessive power in the Congress, which is why he and others settled on the proposal for a "bicameral" legislative branch: a House of Representatives and a Senate. For a bill to become a law, it would have to pass both houses of Congress, which is difficult.As James Madison continued:"The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions."While Madison and others were acutely aware of the potential tyranny of a single despot, king or even president, they were also cautious about the concept of "direct democracy," suspecting that Congress might become a vehicle for "tyranny of the

majority." In such a tyranny, a majority would begin to restrict the rights of individuals and minorities. A Joint Session of CongressAs James Madison wrote in The Federalist #10:“A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischief of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”He saw direct democracy as a danger to individual rights and advocated a representative democracy (also called a republic), in order to protect what he viewed as individual liberty from majority rule, or from the effects of such inequality within society."The tyranny of the Legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period."-Thomas JeffersonAlexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, also raised the problem of an overly-strong legislature in the 1840s:"The legislature is, of all political institutions, the one which is most easily swayed by the wishes of the majority. The Americans determined that the members of the legislature should be elected by the people immediately, and for a very brief term, in order to subject them, not only to the general convictions, but even to the daily passion, of their constituents. The members of both houses are taken from the same class in society, and are nominated in the same manner; so that the modifications of the legislative bodies are almost as rapid and quite as irresistible as those of a single assembly. It is to a legislature thus constituted that almost all the authority of the government has been entrusted. But whilst the law increased the strength of those authorities which of themselves were strong, it enfeebled more and more those which were naturally weak. It deprived the representatives